Memories of Our Mother, Molly Townson

By Wesley Stace

(For her Service of Thanksgiving, 17th May 2019)

Our mother, Molly Townson, was a glorious woman. Every
one of you knows that.

She was born
in Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire on the twenty-ninth of September 1943, but
who’d try to sum up the rest of her?She died on the first of May this
year in Osbon Pharmacy in Ore. Her last words were: "My husband’s in the car.”

Two Sundays ago, my sisters – Melanie and Emma - and I
were invited to this very church for a spontaneous Molly-mini-tribute that
happened to coincide with a baptism. That seemed a good omen. "It’s quite a bouncy baptism,” Joy said at the church
door. It slowly became apparent that by complete bizarre coincidence it wasn’t
just any bouncy baptism, but that of Aurora Deeson, whose father was/is my
friend of longest standing, since I was 13, Martin. I had no idea he had a new
baby - and why would I? He’s my age - let alone that this particular baptism
would be hers. He had no idea that
the church organist who he’d been told had so shockingly died during the
previous week was my mum, whom he first met in 1980. And there we both were,
our party helping celebrate the birth of Aurora and their party celebrating the
life of Molly, everyone uplifted by Joy’s beautiful intertwining of the two
occasions - from Aurora to Molly, from dawn to dusk.It was perfect. Mum
would have loved that coincidence.

And, even in
this moment of sorrow, she would have encouraged me to recognizethat my
sisters and I are not alone,that many here have lost their own mothers,
and that as we are here today celebrating our mother, we celebrate yours
too.

And before I
go any further, I should mention that we will continue celebrating at The Two
Sawyers from 1pm. And if anyone asks the barman for the right drink, the one we
most associate with her, and older people generally, there is a free one
waiting for you behind the bar. On Molly.

Mum’s own mother, our grandmother, Lily Margery
Hayhurst, known to some of you as Midge, died at the age of 70; so we got five
more years of our mother then she did of her own. Mum’s father, Cliff,a newspaperman
and conjuror,died when she was eleven. By then the family was living in
Goole, Yorkshire. She wrote: "That day I had been at the home of my
parents’ friends, the Seltzers, who had a leather goods and sports shop in
Boothferry Road. Looking back, I realise that my Mother probably got me out of
the house on purpose, because my father was so ill. I was just pushing my bike
up and over the bridge near Kingsway School, when I had the horrible feeling
that something was wrong. When I put my bike by the front door, my Mum insisted
I take it round into the basement, which was unusual. That worried me too. And
that was where she hugged me and told me that he had died. My brother, Michael,
who was following in my father’s footsteps, was booked to do a Magic Show that
night and my Mum said he should go ahead. I didn’t go to my father’s funeral,
which took place in Hull. My mother preferred that I go to the circus instead,
so she arranged for me to go with friends to Chipperfields, also in Hull.” In
honor of Mum, my sisters and I are trying to make today a bit like a funeral and
a circus all in one.

To return to Midge for a
second, the reason we didn’t want flowers – apart from the alternative opportunity
this gives us to donate to the Hastings Musical Festival’s newly inaugurated
Molly Townson Bursary Fund for young people intending to pursue a career in the
performing arts – anyway, the reason for the lack of flowers is that for
Grandma’s funeral, which also took place here, Mum requested that there be only
a single cross of white roses on the coffin. However, when the coffin arrived,
there were, much to her concern, two floral arrangements. The latter was a late
arrival, sent directly to the church from the Hung Tao Chinese Restaurant in
Kings Road, a tribute to their regular customer. So this time, we only wanted
one, and it’s from us. Hung Tao besides has closed.

As for the coffin itself,
we’d like you to imagine Ophelia floating down Millais’ pre-Raphaelite river,
or perhaps just a beautiful picnic hamper prepared for the annual trip to
Glyndebourne filled with poached salmon, new potatoes, prosecco and
profiteroles. Just the thought of that would have made her very happy.

You know all our mother’s achievements; you were
taught by her; you sang with her, possibly in this very church where she was
also choir director, and where she and her beloved husband Ken Johnson were
married on the 19th of June, 1998; you grew up with her; you ate her food; you
worked with her at the Hastings Musical Festival or the piano competition,
which she insisted at all times be referred to by its full name, the Hastings
International Piano Concerto Competition.

Here’s how
she remembered her life since moving south from Goole: "I attended the Grammar
School, but I grew up in the Rye Methodist Church, singing in the choir, going
to the Youth Club, being a Sunday School teacher. On leaving school, after a
few months working in the National Children's Home in Harpenden, I worked in my
Grandmother's restaurant, an old timbered vicarage next to the Church in Rye,
originally the birthplace of John Fletcher the Elizabethan playwright and
Shakespeare’s collaborator. At twenty I married Christopher and moved for nine
years to West Sussex, where I began to do more with my singing, in concerts and
Chamber Opera, and took on my first singing pupils. In 1973, when I got
divorced, I moved back to East Sussex, near Hastings, with my three children.
My life since then has been all about music, as a singer, and singing teacher,
Director of Music at a girls’ school, and an adjudicator at festivals. For the
last ten years I’ve been Chairman of the Hastings Musical Festival and I
continue in that role alongside lots of teaching of pupils of all ages,
conducting a ladies choir, and playing the Organ in Church every Sunday.”

She got over Rye but, boy,
she loved Hastings. She lived for Hastings. She actually used to call me in
America whenever there was a favourable article about Hastings in a national
newspaper. Of course, those phone calls stopped a few years ago, because there
were too many such articles and it ceased to be news. And look at Hastings now.
And that was, in a way, partly because of great ideas like the International
Piano Concerto competition and our mother. But trying to get a hold of her
during the entire Festival month of March, aside from a text message sent at
one in the morning, was totally out of the question. I think she more or less
died for Hastings too.

And Hastings honoured
her with the Order of 1066 last year, just in time. But who knew that? Though
she died too young, she died doing exactly what she wanted to do, living
precisely the life she had chosen, with Ken, with the Festival, with the piano
competition. It was as though it was suddenly decided she had worked enough and
that it was time to allow her a swift exit.And more good news: she was always
able to keep Ken close by. The alternative would have been too much.The
bright side is that we get to remember her perfect, entire; there was no slow
decline, no diminishment whatsoever. We’ll always have her just like she was: elegant,
gracious, effortlessly in charge, singing, laughing, planning tomorrow’s meal
during this evening’s dinner. You can throw words like "gracious” around – it’s
the kind of thing people say - but we all know she was those things. No one in
this room thinks of my mother frowning or annoyed. And I can’t speak for my
sisters, but she and I never had an argument, never once. That might say more
about her than it does about me, but the fact is: though she died suddenly,
shockingly, there was never anything left unsaid, no cross words to regret,
nothing to go over and doubt - and in that sense, her death wasn’t sudden at
all, could never be sudden, because she went about her life sorting everything
out, so that everything was settled as if she might happen to die later on that
afternoon. My only regret is that I let her down in my choice of profession:
she wanted me to be a charismatic vicar, like John Wesley. And just for a few
minutes here this afternoon, that’s all worked out OK.

Her favourite
card game was Canasta, and for anyone who knows the rules, she pulled off the
perfect game: she went out concealed. We found one of her verses (she wrote
quite a lot of poetry) on a piece of paper in her handbag - everything was just
how she left it; she’d only popped out to pick up a prescription - and it
reads:

"When my eyes are closing

Show me the green hills of
Tuscany

The cabbages and cauliflower

And Sunday lunch at La
Fonte.”

Tuscany was where she and Ken spent their annual summer
holiday with our father, Christopher - they were friends to the last and an
excellent parental team even at a distance.

My mother’s basic message to the world was: love. You
felt it. We are her lessons: her singing lessons, her lessons of love. Divine love
for the believers; love and respect for each other; love for singing (she
believed in the healing power of song and the human voice above all else; her
singing lessons were a great help to many beyond their improved ability to sing
Art Thou Troubled); love for her
children and grandchildren; love for her stepchildren, Paul, David and Richard
Johnson, their wives and their families. And all those loves were
unconditional. She made everything so easy for everyone else, however much
effort she’d put into it, or however hard it was on her. When a pupil did well,
she was proud for them not for herself. Simply, as more than one person has
recently said to me, she made you want to be a better person.

And she never
ever stopped singing - that’s what we’ll always remember - because she was at
heart a performer, an ambition which she channeled into her life as a music
teacher, adjuicator, and festival organizer. It’s certain that she’s
responsible for many more performers than her three children. She and Emma
performed many times in her Soirée, as
did Melanie, not to mention in many other concerts, but she and I performed
together professionally only once, on the 15th of June last year in Goole.

To cut a many-years-long
story short, it turned out that one of my favourite composers, Gavin Bryars,
had not only, as a child, gone to the same school as Mum but walked there hand
in hand with her. As he said recently in a letter "she was my first love, and
yours too”. More or less on the strength of that, he and I collaborated on a
song called Sussex Ghost Story, which
my mother loved (giving me some quite forceful advice with regards to its delivery).
Recently I came up with a bright idea and interviewed both her and Gavin about
their early lives in Goole, entwining these memories into a spoken piece called
63 Years Later – the source of Mum’s
first person accounts here - which they would recite to Gavin’s music, the idea
being that when they performed the finished article in Goole, they would at
that moment onstage meet for the first time in 63 years. Which they did, but
for a rehearsal that afternoon. That’s showbusiness.

But Gavin was moved to honour
the occasion by writing some songs for my mother to sing. Now he wasn’t the
first composer to write specifically for her - Charles Proctor wrote the Quatre Vocalises for her that she
premiered at the Albert Hall – but Gavin didn’t know much about her voice
besides she was a mezzo-soprano, or that she could necessarily sing the songs;
he just knew that he wanted to do it, that she’d agreed to do it, and that we
all trusted each other. Being a composer however, Gavin only works at theverylast
moment, and being old-fashioned he only works by hand, so the songs didn’t
arrive until, literally, the night before we were meant to drive north. What
arrived by email were scans of spidery handwritten manuscript which Mum’s
printer further reduced to minuscule A4 to fit on the page. We couldn’t read,
let alone understand (mostly because we couldn’t read), this massively
complicated modern music, so she and I got up early and made very rough
recordings of what we thought were the melodies at the piano downstairs. Thus
began a lengthy and comical road trip that involved her trying to learn the
songs from the tape, following along on the microscopic hand corrected
manuscript, as I drove and Ken hummed enthusiastically in the backseat. The
result was not necessarily what Gavin had written, which became apparent during
that only rehearsal, so we rehearsed further, with Gavin’s gentle and zen-like
encouragement: "Don’t worry, Molly. It’s beautiful. You know it better than all
of us.”

By the time
of the gig, whether the performance was or was not perfect, and it was, it felt
like it was. It wasn’t as if, at the age of 75, Mum was regularly performing
complex modern English song. But she couldn’t be ruffled; she had that presence
that persuaded an audience and allowed it to relax. It was precisely what she
did in real life: we were safe in her hands.

Mum had had no idea what she
was getting herself into. It was a leap into the unknown. But she trusted me;
she trusted Gavin; she knew it would be a meaningful, moving and valuable trip
for her, me and Ken (now much more meaningful than we could have then imagined).
The next morning, we saw the two houses where she’d grown up, where her father
had died, the church and pulpit where her grandfather had preached, her school,
the houses of the people she and Gavin had mentioned in 63 Years Later.

That evening, she was
perfect. Everything about it was a complete miracle. Simply that it happened is a miracle because there were
plenty of reasons not to do it. It will always be my greatest memory of my
mother.

So she was perfect. That’s out of the way.

We inevitably saw a different
side to her… but that’s the thing: we didn’t. She was herself, exactly as you
knew her, indulgent, supportive, selfless, funny – it was just a bit better for
us because she was our mother; we were never away from home in her heart. I
could tell you funny stories, but nothing that would surprise you very much. Once,
on seeing from a phone booth that the three of us children were arguing in the
back seat of the car, she took off her shoe to command our attention by banging
the heel on the window. To all our surprise, she smashed the glass… and then
burst out laughing. Her favorite saint, by far, was Saint Therese of Lisieux,
the Little Flower, who wouldn’t have approved of the vandalism of a phone box
on the B2096 near Dallington. One evening, I went to bed and left her up late
playing canasta with a friend of mine, here today, and when I got up in the
morning… they were still playing. She was the best mother in that way: everyone
liked her but it wasn’t like she was trying to be liked, or pretending to be
younger than she was – they just liked her because she made everyone feel at
ease.

And what made
her at ease, what helped her do all those things so well, was God. She found
real solace in all this that surrounds us - and that is a beautiful
thought now, because she is precisely where she wants to be, dare I say not in the heavenly choir, but perhaps
taking over the heavenly choir (it would happen over years, very gently),
telling them to sing up, possibly organizing an interheavenly competition. Or
perhaps even one against the other lot: the ones with the good tunes.

In the service last Sunday,
our vicar Joy spoke the beautiful phrase "we relinquish her into your
extraordinary love” and that we do. But the reason there are so many of us
here, feeling as we do, is because of the extraordinary love she gave us, which
is now so painful to relinquish, but which, given that love, we can and will,
as we feel her presence everyday, and remember the glory of Molly Townson.